Fistulated

I started long before we got to the island, asking the other passengers in the Flex, as we drove between the bridge and Whitefish Point, if they knew what a fistula was. It was the consensus that it sounded dirty, but they didn't, as most people don't, know what it was. A fistula, is an abnormal hole in the body. The most common place you might have seen this is with the fistulated cows on Dirty Jobs. It is hard to get the image of Mike Rowe making faces as he feels around the stomach of a cow, out of your mind. Gross, but cool.

The reason I ask my car though, outside of the fun of trivia combined with the gross, is because one of my favorite medical stories is of a fistula on Mackinac Island, where we will go after we are done at the shipwreck museum. A hole in the stomach of a man.

In 1822, Alexis St. Martin has an accident while he is working as a fur trader on Mackinac Island, long before fudge was the island's claim to fame. This was an island of Native Americans, John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company and a military fort, which had been returned to the Americans at the end of the War of 1812, This accident was a gunshot to the abdomen and ribs, which they expected to kill him. It would have, if not for the skilled Military Surgeon, William Beaumont. His healing, though, was unusual and left a hole between his stomach and the outside world, covered by a flap of skin.

For the next eleven years, Beaumont ran experiments on St. Martin, who became progressively more unhappy with being a guinea pig. It was hard for this young man to lay still as the doctor pushed beef, eggs and other food into his stomach on strings, so he could withdraw them seeing how long they took to digest. At times St. Martin would go missing, but he always returned. Sometimes the things dropped into him made him nauseous or get a fever.

The whole world gained from this knowledge, producing a foundation of most of what we know about digestion, but St. Martin and his family paid the price. Their was a price for this miracle, he was saved, but then enslaved to medicine. When he died, at 81 years old, his family let him decomposed before burying him, for fear a medicine man would resurrect him.

I remember building on the island, which had a famous painting on these experiments, plaques giving details and a host to answer questions, but we didn't find it. A few notes at the fort was all, but it didn't have the punch I remembered. Nothing to give you thoughts about the complex relationship between the brilliant doctor, who sometimes hurt his patient and the reluctant patient, who took eleven years to get away. An odd partnership.